My First Name is not "Coach"…and You Aren't Ready For College
by Brigadier General Ed Wheeler (USA-Ret)
Several years ago, I hung up my uniform at the end of a 35-year military career. Shortly afterward, I was asked to teach as an adjunct in a contemporary U.S. history course at one of our nation’s largest community colleges. I suspect I was asked partly because I had lived through a good chunk of what I would be teaching.
I entered the experience with enthusiasm rather than trepidation because throughout my military career, I had taught soldiers the skills they needed to defend our country, and college students were fundamentally the same age range.
However, among the first things that I encountered was the realization that my first year students were not prepared for college work. In fact, it appeared to me that far too many were comparable to soldiers who hadn’t been through basic training.
In short, whether it was the public or private school system, parents, teachers, administrators or the students themselves, there was abundant and systemic evidence that the secondary educational experience was an abject failure.
How did I come to that conclusion?
Before any soldier goes to war, he attempts to acquire as much operational intelligence as possible.
In approaching the mission of tailoring the curriculum, I decided to determine what my students already knew. By borrowing senior-level history textbooks from public school systems in the region served by our institution, I put together a 100-question diagnostic examination that I gave to each class at the beginning of the semester.
The objective was to determine how to best apply critical thinking in the classroom to enhance what they already knew. Now, after several years of front line classroom experience, I have compiled the diagnostic results of 1,000 students.
The Test Results
Over that period, the results of the very first application of the test have not changed. Of a possible 100 points, all incoming freshmen still average 19.
Obviously, any adjunct who teaches freshman classes is confronted with a quandary. How does one ask students to critically analyze the economic, military and geopolitical reasons why the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the United States, when an average of 17 percent of those students think that December 7, 1941, was the date of the first Super Bowl?
To underscore the lack of basic proficiency even further:
What is even more startling is that part of the diagnostic was an attached United States map accompanied by a request to identify each state. Freshman knowledge of basic American geography is so abysmal that I wouldn’t trust any of them to drive me to Canada even if they had a compass.
Furthermore, their grasp of the English language is mediocre at best. An assignment of a term paper is an exercise in frustration. The vast majority do not know how to spell, structure a simple sentence or comprehend more than a compound paragraph.
Where they are virtually all equipped with palm computers, cell phones and pagers; they can’t write cursive legibly because they were never taught penmanship. This lack of a basic skill makes it virtually impossible to try and understand what they are trying to say when they write responses to essay questions.
Significantly, this lack of preparation was not applicable exclusively to students from the geographic region of the school in which I teach. The 1,000 students I used for this study represented 21 states, two American territories (Guam and Puerto Rico) and several foreign countries. The results also crossed gender, racial, and socio-economic lines.
The obvious question is why are so many students arriving at college unprepared?
An obvious corollary question is, how many other disciplines are affected as well?
Additionally, many of my present colleagues, who have taught in public school systems, frankly admit that they were pressured by a principal or administrator to give failing students passing grades. In our litigious society, it’s not far-fetched to imagine a high school administrator embroiled in a lawsuit because a student failed a course.
As a result of this systemic failure, I and my fellow academicians are forced to spend too much of our class time during the semester in reme-diation, just to provide our students the foundation for what we are supposed to be teaching them. In effect, we are forced to take students through an intellectual basic training before they can go on with their studies. Although that should have been the purpose of their secondary education, it falls to us to do it instead.
However, in a community college, where students can knock off two years at bargain rates, we humble adjuncts have the freedom and obligation to be honest. We are not going to get tenure; we have no benefits and we can be terminated without cause. Because of those reasons, we can make an important contribution. We are free to give our students a dose of reality and the real grade they earned. By doing this, we will kick start the next generation.
